Prompt your class to interact with Jack London's Call of the Wild. By analyzing the events in the novel, middle schoolers discover how human experiences create who a person becomes. They critique and analyze the reading, focusing on...

Read then role-play the characters from story of If You Give A Pig a Pancake. Young actors use improvisation and characterization to create the characters from the story. They will also write and role play original version of the story...

A 46-slide presentation focuses on ways to describe characters in stories, how to create story characters, and how to show a character's personality in a student-created story. The colorful and engaging slides provide lots of great ideas...

"Call me Ishmael." "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." "It was a dark and stormy night. . ." Beginning at the beginning is one of the biggest challenges in writing. Here's an assignment that asks writers to draft the...

How do writers use the interaction between elements like characterization and setting to create meaning? Readers of "A Worn Path" create a series of comic book-style graphics of Eudora Welty's short story and reflect on how Welty uses...

"The ways of men are strange, and hard to learn." Or so Ultima, the curandera in Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, tells Antonio. Yet Antonio does learn from the men in this story and groups consider what Antonio learns from Andrew,...

The seventh activity in a ten-part unit that uses The Things They Carried as the core text, looks at the evolution of Norman Bowker, a character who "almost won the silver star for valor." Readers are asked to consider whether there are...

"They all carried ghosts." Mitchell Sanders, Lieutenant Cross, Ted Lavender, Azar, Dave Jensen, Lee Strunk, Bob Kiley, Curt Lemon. Protagonists and antagonists? Major or minor characters? And what about Tim O'Brien? Author or character?...

Visualize the rich imagery from Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying with a discussion about setting. Kids reflect on the setting and its impact on the story before writing about various events and characterization. For homework,...

Class groups adopt a character in The Grapes of Wrath and examine how the character has changed or failed to change by the time the Joad family reaches California. Individuals then examine either Tom and Casy or Ma and Rosasharn and, in...

Invite your pupils to express their understanding of a novel through a collaborative video project. Groups choose a novel from those you have studied in class, select four scenes, storyboard the scenes, film the scenes, edit the film,...

Provide this packet for your pupils as they pour over The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. The study guide includes graphic organziers and comprehension as well as higher-level questions. Class members briefly summarize each chapter, compare...

Ged, the main character in A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, goes though many changes over the course of the novel. Ask your class to look at his development through the first eight chapters. Pupils discuss Ged's relationship...

Zoom in on a single character's traits and actions. There is space here to write down details about the character's appearance, words, actions, and interactions. Pupils also note down the main impression they have about the character.

Take note of six different character traits on a straightforward chart. Individuals write down the character's name and provide an example that demonstrates each character trait they note down.

Explore the impact a narrator's point of view has on a story with a reading of the children's book, Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne. Written in four different voices, the story is told and retold from different perspectives to...

Characters are built with more than just what the author directly says about a character (ex: she is smart). Help your pupils focus on several elements of characterization with a graphic organizer that has space for two characters....

Has your class just started Somewhere in the Darkness by Walter Dean Myers? This guide sheet, created for the first 29 pages of the novel, offers review of and practice with characterization, prediction, summary, and inference. Pupils...

Building upon prior lessons in the series, this reading and writing exercise requires pupils to look back at their own writing, track character development in the novel The Cay, and analyze how Phillip has changed. The reading focus is...

Enhance and extend instruction of "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin with one or all of these ideas. You might want to cover characterization and summary, or improve understanding of context clues and irony. You can cover any...

"What is George upset about? Check all that apply." Here's a worksheet that asks readers to delve more deeply into character attitudes and motivations. In addition, Part II asks individuals to record passages from that text that capture...

Use this handout to focus on the character traits of George and Lennie in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Readers are given a set of specific traits to search for in the first chapter. They are required to list two textual examples of...

What does Candy look like? What kind of a person is Curley? What is Slim's dream? Readers of Of Mice and Men take their turn at characterization by creating a sketch chart for each of the major characters in Steinbeck's classic novel....

"I wisht somebody'd shoot me if I got old an' a cripple." Young readers examine one of the ways Steinbeck brings his characters to life by closely examining what characters say and imaging why Steinbeck choose these words. A great way to...